Which Amiga OS to install

[Cammy]

3.9 is slow because of Picture Datatype, among other things. On an AGA machine, it is very slow remapping all images internally from 24bit to your palette-mapped Workbench screen. Since you're using a graphics card there shouldn't be any remapping needed, and images should display directly without the slowdown they'd get on an AGA system. Sticking with 3.1 won't hurt, but 3.9 does offer a lot more options and fixes, and should run quite well thanks to your RTG card.

[Cammy]

I agree with Matt H. There's really no point using 3.9 on a system like that. Our 030/50/FPU A1200 sticks with 3.1 and is much, much faster than it is running 3.9. There's no way of making picture.datatype faster unless someone smarter rewrites it.

[Cammy]

Unfortunately picture.datatype in OS3.9 is just much slower than the 3.1 version, no matter what bitdepth the images being used are. I have pre-remapped every image I use in all of my programs to a special, locked 16 colour palette. In a program like YAM, which needs to load many of these images on startup, the difference in load times between 3.1 and 3.9 is very noticable. It takes less than a minute to load in 3.1, but over a minute to load in 3.9, and all the images it's loading are 4bit 16 colour iffs.

[Cammy]

Reducing your onscreen colours isn't going to solve the problem, it will still take much longer to load all images, they'll just look worse and your screen will refresh quicker.